How to Customize your Terminal Prompt

Whether you use the Terminal occasionally or regularly, you might find it appropriate to change the way it looks beyond the color scheme and transparency settings. How about changing the actual command line prompt? It’s quite easy, and can be a fun way to further customize your Macs appearance.

Changing the way the terminal prompt looks is not too complicated, but it involves some fairly minor usage of the command line, which, given that you are wanting to customize how the bash prompt looks, we assume you’re at least somewhat familiar with the Terminal. And yes, this applies to all versions of OS X, as every version on every Mac defaults to using bash as the command prompt. OK let’s get started.

The default command line prompt in Mac OS X is something like:

ComputerName:CurrentDirectory User$

That would look something like this when the Terminal has been launched:

MacBook:~/Desktop Admin$

Not too bad, but kind of boring, and not the best, right? It’s quite easy to change though, and you can really customize your bash Terminal prompt to look like almost anything you want.

We’re going to assume you use the default bash shell, so you’ll be editing either the file .bashrc, .bash_profile, or .profile if you installed fink.

Thus, to start customizing the bash prompt, at your current Terminal prompt, type the following to load the appropriate profile into nano text editor:

nano .bashrc

Yes, you can change that to .bash_profile or .profile depending on your specifics:

nano .bash_profile

You’ll probably be presented with a plain file, so type the following onto a line in the terminal to get started:

Between the quotation marks of export PS1=” “, you can add the following lines to customize your Terminal prompt:

\d – Current date

\t – Current time

\h – Host name

\# – Command number

\u – User name

\W – Current working directory (ie: Desktop/)

\w – Current working directory with full path (ie: /Users/Admin/Desktop/)

(Note if you just want to use a custom bash prompt one-off or to test out the appearance of changes before setting them in the bash profile, you can simply use the export commands, the change will take effect immediately with the export command but will be abandoned when that Terminal session is ended.)

So, let’s take a few examples. Perhaps you want your Terminal prompt to display the User, followed by the hostname, followed by the directory, then the appropriate .bashrc entry would be:

export PS1="\u@\h\w $ "

which will look like the following when rendered at the actual bash prompt:

Admin@MacBook~Desktop/ $

Cool huh? You can also change the prompt itself to anything, it doesn’t have to be the $ sign, simply replace it with whatever else you’d like to use, : for example would be:

export PS1="\u@\h\w: "

which is the same as above, but : instead of $

Admin@MacBook~Desktop/: "

So, play around and see what you prefer. My personal favorite is the following:

export PS1="\W @ \h [\u] $ "

This renders looking the currently active directory (PWD), the hostname of the computer, and the username of the current user, looking like the following:

/System @ MacBookPro [Paul] $

With modern versions of OS X, you can even include an Emoji in the prompt by dragging it into the place you’d like it to display, for example:

export PS1="\h:\W (DRAG EMOJI HERE) $ "

That would display as:

Hostname:Desktop (Emoji) $

Seen in this picture below:

When you’re satisfied with the appearance of your prompt, save the .bash_profile file edits in nano by hitting Control+o and you can then exit out of the nano program by hitting Control+x

If you really want to, you can also just use a standard text editor like like TextWrangler or TextEdit to edit your .profile, but if you’re changing your terminal prompt you should likely learn how to modify files from the command line too.

If you’d rather change things to look more graphical, there’s also a simple how-to designed to make your Terminal prompt include an emoji character (yes, the same emoji icons that people use for text messaging), you can read that here if you are interested.

Finally, keep in mind this is changing the command prompt, not the appearance of the Terminal app windows. If you like customizing the look of things, changing the appearance of Terminal is well worth doing, as you can add a huge number of changes and customizations to the way a standard Terminal window renders. Added together with a custom command prompt and the days of having a boring looking terminal will be long gone, on your Mac anyway. It’s probably obvious, but yes these prompt customizations work beyond OS X and in Unix and Linux as well.

Do you have a cool prompt you want to share? Post yours in the comments, try to include both the export command as well as what the prompt will render as, to make it easier for others to determine if they want to try it or not.

54 Comments

creates a line break in the prompt, too. It’s not ideal, I guess, but when you’re in a really deep directory, it’s good not to have the prompt all the way on the right edge of the screen, but it’s also nice to see the entire directory without asking (pwd) all the time.

This is not an OS X trick, in fact I post my .bashrc online: http://phil.cryer.us/code/dotfiles/bashrc and use it on FreeBSD/Linux at home, and Solaris, AIX, HP-UX at work. I’ve shared this with many co-workers and friends too, and it’s easy enough to modify if you need to. It gives output like this:

[09:51:54] [uname@hostname ~/home]$

I like having the time on each line, it makes it very easy to deal with logs to compare when an even happened. With 10 terms open having the uname and hostname listed is great, and the path is a standard, but this one truncates so it doesn’t push your $ all the way over to the side. I’ve tweaked this for years, but this is how I use it day to day.

Love it! I have modified it slightly to use os x’s emoji support, and turning the smiley face into the prompt. For anyone who is wondering what gid’s prompt string does, it returns a smiley face or sad face, depending on whether the previous command returned 0 (success) or non-zero (failure).

for whatever reason, it appears that my .bashrc file is not being executed when i start up Terminal. i can set the “run command” for the basic window profile to execute the . .bashrc command to change the prompt, but it seems like it should work automatically. have i missed something?

I switched from vista to mac OS just 2 weeks ago, so I ‘m still a mac beginner.
Thank u yery much for ur tips.
It looks now much better than before. I always wanted to change the actual command line prompt but never succeeded to do it.
I have followed your instructions and also added \T for another time format, \s for shell name \v for shell version, it is really easy .

I switched from vista to mac OS just 2 weeks ago, so I ‘m still a mac beginner.
Thank u yery much for ur tips.
It looks now much better than before. I always wanted to change the actual command line prompt but never succeeded to do it.
I have followed your instructions and also added \T for another time format, \s for shell name \v for shell version, it is really easy .

Thank you
you have really saved my time.I was searching for a long time for a help to cutomize my command prompt.
At the begining I have forgotten the dot space dot bashrc thing in . .bashrc so the changes couldn’t be affected but shortly after I fixed it. :)
That was very helpful especially coz I’m lost fan and I got a nice Lost ’style for my prompt with the following command
export PS1=”\u@\h\w at \t :” .
I’m expecting more tips for mac users in you blog:)
keep up the good work

I am a banker & I just bought a Mac computer with my bonus I last week. Its the first time that I am using a Mac operating computer & I didn’t quite understand how to use it properly though I am able to get familiar with the basic operations.
I was able to find this post on Mac terminal skins – http://www.levoltz.com/2009/08/08/macchanging-skins-of-the-terminal/ but is quite hard & complicated to understand for me. Its the first post that came across for me since I mostly use that blog for information.
Its a good blog, but then, I found yours & its really great there are so many & topics to discuss. Although its hard for me to understand some things in this, I guess that blog posts will be a fast track to get familiar Mac operating systems.

I thank you you for this amazing post. Keep it up. I will keep in touch.

Thank you!
This helped me out in customizing my prompt in Snow Leopard. To make my prompt more permanent, instead of having to reload .bashrc everytime I opened up a terminal window, I edited the /etc/bashrc file. You’ll need to use sudo since it’s a read only file. Here’s what mine looks like:

PS1=’\u@\h:
\w$ ‘

So you get the username@host on the first line and then the second line you get the PWD$.

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I know this is old but: depending on what you have in those files linking one to the other can cause problems depending on the type of shell invocation (interactive, login) is active. For the record this is how it’s done in other Unices (at least Linux; it’s been well over a decade since I used other Unices than Linux! – I want to say it’s been 15 years as of last month or even this month exactly):

# .bash_profile
# Get the aliases and functions
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
. ~/.bashrc
fi
# EOF (not in mine but just showing that I’m done with the pasting)

It should be noted too that should you go the symlink route if the file already exists you’ll have to specify the -f option (it will overwrite the file if you have the right privilege so be wary if you don’t know what you’re doing – in fact be wary always at the command prompt! – well always be careful full stop).

In my new iMac with Lion, the terminal prompt was unknown34ce6f4c0ea5 ~ bud$. From this discussion I discovered that the hostname being used was \h = unknown23de6f4c0da2. I replaced \h with my correct computer name as shown in the Sharing preference pane.

Does anyone have an idea how \h got messed up, and do I have to worry about this crazy hostname affecting other things? The hex number looks like a MAC address except I don’t think I have that particular address anywhere although it differs from my wi-fi hardware Mac address by only 4 of the characters.

Another i personally use is editing the ~/.bash_rc file and adding the following line in order to view octal and normal drwxr etc permissions when typing list at the prompt (as apposed to typing ls -al)

The real magic is in the colorization that’s easily made with that utility, of course you need to set your own xterm / Terminal profile colors in Preferences for the app, or themes for Terminal sessions, but, it can look really fancy in a jiff.